Tag Archives: The Swampers

But the reason the Swampers, and the little Alabama hole in the wall recording studio where they shook the world, were in Muscle Shoals was because Rick Hall, trying to make his mark outside of Memphis, without resorting to Nashville, fetched up there and set up the third point of American music’s great Southern triangle. Rick Hall was Fame Studios and Fame Studios was Rick Hall.

They both ended up being a lot of other things. A whole lot of people contributed. Mostly black artists and mostly white session men with a mix of songwriters, all trying to prove each other to each other in the classic Southern style while George Wallace’s Alabama (where Hall made a point of frequenting local diners in the company of Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett) tried to turn back the clock all around them.

But it was Hall’s vision and once he took hold of it Southern Soul and the world it was born to save were never quite the same.

It was from Hall’s place that the careers of Arthur Alexander and Percy Sledge and Clarence Carter and Joe Tex and Candi Staton were launched and those of Etta James and Aretha Franklin (specifically chasing Sledge’s success) were reborn. And that was just the tip of a mighty iceberg. Shamefully, he died without entering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (can’t blame the voters for that one–nods to visionary producers and label owners are in the hands of the Hall’s own committee).

Doesn’t matter. I just got the playlist from the Entrance Commission at the Pearly Gates.

I’m hearing it’s the greatest night ever. Smoked Jerry Wexler’s entry party and they’re swearing even Berry Gordy’s gonna have to run to keep up…(The Wilson Pickett cut is live and not to be missed).

Hope your vision comes all the way true where you are now brother….Because it sure is lying in tatters down here.

“…Ronnie Van Zant’s voice mesmerized me. When he’d go ‘Yeaaaaow,’ it just wiped me out. I couldn’t wait to work with him because I’d never worked with an artist that distinctive. He had that fingerprint sound man, and nobody sounded like him, nobody!”

Bear in mind that Johnson, as ace session guitarist and some-time producer and engineer, worked with practically everybody: Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Etta James, the Rolling Stones, Mavis Staples, Linda Ronstadt, Jimmy Cliff and so on and so forth–and had worked with most of them by the time he first heard Ronnie’s voice. I mention this only because I don’t think a lot of people put Ronnie Van Zant in that same class of vocalist and, frankly, they should.

Of course Van Zant, likely the last truly epic blues singer, white or black, who will ever find a mass audience, eventually repaid Johnson’s faith in him (and gave a rousing shout back) in the Swampers’ chapter of a little epic called “Sweet Home Alabama.” The Swampers’ chapter, for those who don’t recall, came right after the chapter where the shout-out to George Wallace went, “Boo, boo, boo!”

Which–since it emanated from a working class southern white boy whose habit of performing in front of a Confederate flag was not likely to be forgiven just because he confounded so many other stereotypes, up to and including making a record called “Sweet Home Alabama,” which was taken into the stratosphere as much by a chorus of black female background singers as by its famous stone cold riff or Van Zant’s own powerhouse lead vocal–was/is automatically stereo-typed by many as being pro-Wallace.